This Thanksgiving I challenge you all to imagine your dinner party as a metaphor for sharing the worlds resources.

Please join me in this mental exercise.

Imagine, you are the host this Thanksgiving and you invite 9 people to attend your dinner who come from all walks of life, and who have nowhere else to go on this holiday.  Now, it is time to eat and everyone sits down at the table to enjoy all the food everyone brought.  The question is, how much does each person get to eat?

The hope is that after reading this article, you will think twice about consuming more than your fare share of resources.

In a usual Thanksgiving scenario, everyone gets at least one plateful of food, then the rest is split up by the people who are still hungry.  It would be rude to take 3 plates of food before anyone else had a chance to eat.  In fact, you probably would not be invited back to another dinner party if you did that.  There are social rules that are accepted by most humans on Thanksgiving, and for the most part, people abide by those rules.  At least in the San Franciscan Bay Area, we would hope so

However, why is this not the case on the global scale?

Why is it that we do not share the world’s resources so that everyone can get the same amount of food on their plate?  Or the same amount of water & electricity to every home?  I will answer this question without discussing the intricate details of a free capitalist market, compartmentalized governments, and the evolutionary history of the human race.  Because all of these factor in.  Instead I want to raise a basic point.

We don’t equally share everything because we can’t see the origins or the stock piles of all the resources that get delivered to us on a daily basis.

In most cases, we don’t even take part in delivering those resources.  Gas, water, electricity gets to our homes by some company that we rarely ever think about when plugging an appliance into the wall or taking a hot shower.  When we go to the grocery store we rarely think about how a product was made, where it was made, and how it arrived at the store we shop at and how much more of this product exists.  We just take it for granted that we have hot water and electricity and food on demand.

However, what if all the resources you used for your everyday life were in your backyard and there was no general store to purchase all your necessities?  Let’s say you had a farm where you raise turkeys and grow fresh produce, a windmill that generated electricity for your home, and you used firewood to keep your house warm.

You would have to ration your crops and your turkey in order to get you through the year,  ration your firewood to get you through the winter, and on days when there was no wind, you would not have electricity.  Yes I realize there are other solutions to these problems, like asking a neighbor for help, but I am oversimplifying to make a point.

If we can’t see the resources in front of us, how are we supposed to know how much to ration so that the resources will last?  Especially if those resources are being distributed around the world by organizations we have never heard of or have no relationship with other than the fact that we buy their products.

In the Thanksgiving dinner scenario I gave above, it would be obvious how much food is available because it is right there in plain sight.  And everyone would be able to see how much each person consumed.  However if there was a delivery truck that came by every 30 min with a little bit of food and you didn’t know when that truck was going to stop delivering, it would change things a little.

Do I have a solution to this problem…  It would be obtuse of me to think everyone would investigate the location of every yam they were purchasing this Thanksgiving, then find out the crop yield for the season, and limit their yam purchases in order to share with the rest of the yam consumers.  That is just not reasonable.

The goal of this post is solely to make you think about your consumption behavior. Everyone is sharing the world’s resources and those resources are being distributed unequally to the affluent.  Just because you can afford to consume more turkey than the average person, it does not mean you are entitled to do so.  If you were at a Thanksgiving dinner, would you consume three plates of food because you are more affluent than the less fortunate people attending?

Thanks to operationlettertosanta.com and fanpop.com  for the photos.